Ahead of its launch, a Core i5-7600K processor (not ES) made its way to Chinese tech publication PCOnline, who wasted no time in putting it through their test-bench, taking advantage of the next-gen CPU support BIOS updates put out by several socket LGA1151 motherboard manufacturers. Based on the 14 nm "Kaby Lake" silicon, the i5-7600K succeeds the current i5-6600K, and could be positioned around the $250 price-point in Intel's product-stack. The quad-core chip features clock speeds of 3.80 GHz, with 4.20 GHz max Turbo Boost frequency, and 6 MB of L3 cache. Like all its predecessors, it lacks HyperThreading.

In its review of the Core i5-7600K, PCOnline found that the chip is about 9-10% faster than the i5-6600K, but that's mostly only due to its higher clock speeds out of the box (3.80/4.20 GHz vs. 3.50/3.90 GHz of the i5-6600K). Clock-for-clock, the i5-7600K is just about 1% faster, indicating that the "Kaby Lake" architecture offers only negligible IPC (instructions per clock) performance gains over the "Skylake" architecture. The power-draw of the CPU appears to be about the same as the i5-6600K, so there appear to be certain fab process-level improvements, given the higher clock speeds the chip is having to sustain, without a proportionate increase in power-draw. Most of the innovation appears to be centered on the integrated graphics, which is slightly faster, and has certain new features. Find more performance figures in the review link to PCOnline below.

"Negligible IPC Gains" - finaly - only titles like that would make one start to think and ask for more.... so far my comments about that Kaby lake will have worst gains of CPU history and definitely not worth for upgrade (if you have something from Sandy Bridge - year 2010 and above)... got respones like: "we can not know that... man, you are just a hater/broke/amd fanboi/stop trolling"

aldo5 said:"Negligible IPC Gains" - finaly - only titles like that would make one start to think and ask for more.... so far my comments about that Kaby lake will have worst gains of CPU history and definitely not worth for upgrade (if you have something from Sandy Bridge - year 2010 and above)... got respones like: "we can not know that... man, you are just a hater/broke/amd fanboi/stop trolling"

That's not quite true, Sandy Bridge is starting to get quite long in the tooth now and you'd at least want an Ivy Bridge or Haswell processor if you're playing recent games or doing some more computationally heavy things.
Also Sandy Bridge was launched in 2011...

Also keep in mind that you get other new technologies by upgrading, such as native USB 3.0, USB 3.1, M.2 and so on.

That said, you're right in saying that Kaby Lake is disappointing overall from a CPU perspective, as the improvements all seems to be on the graphics side, which I presume most of us here on TPU don't care much about.

Intel wants a chip in OEM systems and a mobile variant with iGPU graphics capability. In AMD's absence, they've had no business reason to vastly improve IPC (even if they could).
I might actually side grade to a Skylake if it gets price drops when Kaby releases or if Zen is AWOL or underperforms.
One factor we don't yet know is if Kaby can hold higher overclocking frequency. If Kaby can go to 5Ghz, the that might make it another far favourite. But we don't know these things yet.

I like the fact that the 200 series chipset will have 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes (4 more than Skylake/100 series). That will allow more lanes for fast SSDs like the Samsung 960 series, without sacrificing any ports. Also, the i7-7700K will turbo boost up to 4.5GHz (300 MHz higher than Skylake i7-6700K).

aldo5 said:"Negligible IPC Gains" - finaly - only titles like that would make one start to think and ask for more.... so far my comments about that Kaby lake will have worst gains of CPU history and definitely not worth for upgrade (if you have something from Sandy Bridge - year 2010 and above)... got respones like: "we can not know that... man, you are just a hater/broke/amd fanboi/stop trolling"

Who said that to you? Names please, so I can laugh at them.

Everyone with half a brain knew Kaby Lake was not going to be anything interesting *at all*. Kaby Lake is Intel postponing their shit just a bit more and that is all she wrote. Basically, Skylake confirmed that Intel lost its mojo as far as CPU is concerned. Its underwhelming, and it is the architecture taxed to capacity. Intel needs to add cores to mainstream, it is the only way they now have to improve package performance apart from just raising clockspeeds. And they will, apparently Coffee Lake will be having 6-core mainstream CPUs.

Tick-tock-'optimize' said Intel... and people believed it was going to be great.

LMAO

the54thvoid said: If Kaby can go to 5Ghz, the that might make it another far favourite. But we don't know these things yet.

If... I think what we are seeing here is Intel doing a Nvidia Pascal. The process allows for higher guaranteed clocks and those are directly taken away from its OC capability. The CPUs already have turbo and the clockspeed ceilings have not been going up across the board, but only very situationally. Sandy still clocked as good or better.

I had no doubt Kaby Lake would bring zero performance gains over SkyLake. I only hoped Intel is still having a bit of conscience and would start soldering their 4-core CPUs to the heat spreaders like good ol' Sandy Bridge days. Not the case unfortunately.

P4-630 said:Well at that short time they weren't ahead, because AMD had the first 64bit capable CPU before Intel had one.

You're right ( SHORT TIME )
But after that AMD has not do anything worth in order to keep in competition with Intel, even it looks like year after year AMD is getting worse and worse, their last chance is Zen and let's hope for those AMD believers that this time they go back in the Game.